Ben Folds: The 13th Floor Interview

Ben Folds is due to play his first-ever New Zealand show at Auckland’s Powerstation on February 19th when he brings his Paper Aeroplane Request Tour down under.

Despite having lived in Australia for a while, the American singer-songwriter has never been to Aotearoa.

To be fair, he’s been a busy guy. In addition to his pop music career, Folds has been making orchestral music, hosting a TV series and saving vintage buildings.

The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda tracked down Ben Folds as he was on the road in the US to talk to him about his Auckland show and to find out what this paper aeroplane thing was all about.

Click here to listen to the interview with Ben Folds:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: Maybe you can explain, for folks, exactly what the concept is behind the tour?

BF: I think my audience generally understands it. Requests probably are going to be part of it – people yell requests – especially if you’re playing solo piano: there’s enough space going on to where someone can yell and be heard. Depending on how you look at it, you’re vulnerable to the heckling, or you’re open to requests, and I’ve always been very informal about it: someone says something at the right time, fuck it, I just play it. I was thinking: it would be nice if it was organised and somewhat fair; like, everyone throws a plane at once, they land on the stage, and I just walk around randomly picking them up.

The second half of the show is a ten song set, which just comes off the stage. I’ve got very little control over it; one thing I can do is, if I pick up one that is unplayable, I just drop it – meaning that I’ve already played it before; so, I’m not going to let them listen to it twice; or someone’s put down some song I’ve never heard of; stuff like that – but if I don’t drop it and pick it up, it’s because… I’ve written a lot of songs, and I’ve performed a lot of songs that I didn’t write, and they’re all out there online; someone might know that I played a song one night with some guy somewhere on stage, and don’t even remember it, they might ask for that; and I’m obliged to try to give it a shot. Too much of that makes it a shitty show, though. If you start to pick up four or five of those in a row, it becomes pretty challenging, because it’s really fair for anyone in the audience – except, of course, the dude who threw the plane – but generally, it works really well. It’s really fun, mixes it up for me, and I have no idea what’s coming next, and it’s pretty cool! The moment where they all throw the planes is really fun too: the air is just full of planes, and that’s pretty fun!

MD: Do you get some creative paper aeroplanes?

BF: You do! I feel like it’s a little bit like being loud. I have this fair gene, where I’m not going to go straight for that crazy, big, pink thing… let’s make this even; it’s just another plane; but you see it over and over… I’ll just walk by… and so, I pick up the big, pink plane today, but sometimes I don’t. Someone made a plane out of a massive, corporate blueprint for some mall – he’s an architect – it’s the biggest thing you’ve ever seen; I had to pick that up! I had to open it all the way up, to see what his request was, and it was like a map; it was huge! So yeah, it’s kind of fun; it’s interesting.

MD: It sounds interesting! You mentioned that it’s inevitable that people are going to shout things out, because there’s so much space. In general, do you find that kind of behaviour disconcerting, or do you welcome it, or does it depend on the night for you?

BF: Neither. It’s really neither. I think the thing is that there are piano bars, and that culture: I never was into that. I’m a song writer, and that’s my main thing, and also, I have good manners: I like it to be a fun time, but there are lines on either side of the performance… that I’m not comfortable with: making it a big fucking frat party: I’m not into. I’m not into being a clown. There’s a line that’s like, “This is not dignified. I’ve written a shit-ton of songs and pieces, and things. That’s what I do, and that’s my art,” and on the other side, I don’t like to be precious either; and I think the paper airplane thing shows that. It does cause you to draw an interesting line, because as soon as the audience stands up and their throwing airplanes, then there’s a wall that’s broken down: you don’t encourage people to throw things at the stage – that’s normally not what you do – and there’s a reason for that, but it’s neat to see what they want played. I’ve always recognised that certain music, certain songs, are far more popular in certain regions than others. I almost look at the audience, sometimes, and make a wild guess by the way they look: like, “Oh, this is an audience that bought into ‘this’ era,” or, “This is ‘this’ era’s audience,” for one reason or another; or that you’d have a hit somewhere and away – that’s regional to some small place. I don’t know anything about how it feels in New Zealand. This is my first appearance in New Zealand – I’ve never been to New Zealand….

MD: Yeah, I was surprised about that…. Because you lived in Australia for a while, right?

BF: Yeah. I spent a lot of time in Australia, and I did live there. With New Zealand, my biggest concern is sand flies: I don’t know anything about them, and I want to go out and see some shit and nature, but everything you see about it is you have to cover up for sand flies.

MD: I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. I haven’t had that problem; so, I think you’ll be alright.

BF: Oh okay…. I’ve been talking about way out in the wilderness. Have you been out camping, kayaking – stuff like that – and dealt with sand flies?

MD: I don’t spend a lot of times in the great outdoors; so, maybe I’ve just missed it. I’ve gone to the beach, and there are not too many flies there. It’ll be good for you to get here: it’s a pretty interesting country.

BF: Oh, I can’t wait to see it. How long have you been there?

MD: Since 1994; so, a long time.

BF: Wow, yeah. Good! Yeah, way before all the eccentric, rich people want to move there when the end of the world was happens!

MD: Right, exactly! Now, you mentioned that your song writing and your music are the main thing that you do; but there are an awful lot of other things that you seem to be doing: you’re involved in photography and working with symphony orchestras, and things. Do people who come to a show – like the paper airplane request show – … generally… aware of these other things that you’re up to?

BF: You know, I really wouldn’t know. I think there’s the real probability that there are people who aren’t even aware of other parts of my record making career, other than the one that they’re familiar with. I did a show in the US – an NBC show called Sing Off. It was five seasons of a Fall, abridged sort of Fall season. It had twenty million viewers; it’s a big show, but it was brief. Every year was brief; almost like a holiday show. I did this for five years, and started realising that I had a huge following of people who knew me from that show, who knew I was a musician, but hadn’t heard my music; and my manager always thought that these people were going to go out and buy my record. I knew they wouldn’t, because it’s like… finding out that Anderson Cooper had a music career one time: you might check it out on YouTube, but probably not; that’s how they saw me. They were like, “Oh, that guy’s a judge on Sing Off. That’s what he does.” I guess what I’m saying is I could have hit on country radio,but you probably would never hear it and be aware of it; and when you showed up at the show, and some people with cowboy hats were there throwing stuff on the stage, and I was playing some ‘crying in your beer’ shit, you’d be surprised. I think that’s the way my career is.

MD: So, it’s segmented, and it has its own little bits and pieces, I guess.

BF: Yeah, because I do a lot of orchestral work. I know a subscription audience member, because they’re old; it’s simple. That’s not something that people do anymore, really – is subscribe – and so, if they’ve got subscriber season tickets, they’re usually over sixty, at least; and, you know, they think I’m great, but they have no idea what else I’ve done. If they heard me covering Dr. Dre, or something, they’d probably be horrified; no idea that there’s a whole part of Europe that doesn’t know anything of my music but Bitches Ain’t Shit, and didn’t even know who that was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSJxvi767kQ

I had a viral hit once with this crazy chat roulette thing. It had millions of views, and my name wasn’t even on it for the first six million views that happened in a couple of days. No one knew who it was; and so, I was famous for that, with kids: I go into a Starbucks, or something, and people are like, “Hey, you’re that guy!” I thought they were talking about ‘I’m that guy that makes my records’, but they thought I’d done my video over green screen – it was a fake audience – they didn’t know who it was. I’ve had a lot of stuff like that. In fact, I was spending time really lobbying to save an historic studio in Nashville, Tennessee; and it was on the front of the New York Times; it was on political shows; it became a passed around thing, when it came to saving buildings, internationally. The reason that I could get that kind of leverage, is because I’m known some, but it reached people who didn’t know who I was. I was in the UK – I was in a cab – and the cab driver was like, “You’re that guy,” and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m that guy,” and then he’s like, “I think everyone should be ‘save the studios’. Let me drive you by this old thing,” and I realised he didn’t really know my music to know who I was, but now he had had seen my picture. Got to the hotel, and the guy that brought me room service: same thing. I think he was Korea, from Seoul; just moved there, got the job, saw this on television, and was like, “Oh! You’re that guy!” You can be famous in all these different ways, and no one ever connects the dots…

MD: And then you find out you could have a little cottage industry of just saving old studios, I guess.

BF: Well, that’s right. You know the way the United States says ‘World Series’? And when you’re growing up, even if you know it’s not really the world, it’s in your head: you think that’s the world; that’s part of your upbringing…. It’s nothing! It’s four people playing cricket! So, in the rock industry, we think we’re famous; we’re not! I was playing a thing in Seattle once, and if you opened the local entertainment papers, I was the thing to see: they were like, “This is the thing to see this week,” “This is what you should see,” “This is what makes you cool.” Yeah, I only had fifteen hundred, two thousand people there, and it looked impressive – it packed the place; that was fine – but we had a hard time getting into sound check, because there was a show next door that drew something like seventy thousand people into an arena; and it was by a band that no one has ever heard of, because they brought with them a tele-evangelist – and it was a tele-evangelist, Christian thing – they’re hugely known in their ‘neck of the woods’ much more than us. And they weren’t in any magazines; no one knew who the fuck they were! They were stopping traffic. “What’s on tonight?” “What’s on is Folds! He’s the only thing in town.” “Okay, Folds is the only thing on tonight,” and then you go and find out it’s this Christian thing. That’s what people need to watch out with this Trump guy: because… that was happening, and people thought ‘this is the real stuff, and then this is on the side’. I don’t want to make any kind of pitch with the guy at all, but I will say that he wasn’t wrong about that rally stuff.

MD: Yeah, it’s easy to be focussed, narrowly, on the stuff that you know about, and you think everyone else is thinking in the same terms, and then find out later that there’s a whole other thing going on.

BF: Yeah, it’s never the thing. There’s never the thing.